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THE AMERICAN PIONEER 
AND HIS STORY 



AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT IOWA CITY IOWA ON 

THE OCCASION OF THE FIFTEENTH ANNUAL 

MEETING OP THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 

HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 



BY 
GEORGE F. PARKER 



PUBLISHED AT IOWA CITY IOWA IN 1922 BY 
THE STATE HISTOEICAL SOCIETY OF IOWA 



F3 5I 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS \ 
RECEIVED 

JUL191922 

DOCUMENTS DJViSlO: 



THE AMERICAN PIONEER AND 
HIS STORY 

I DEFINE the American Pioneer as the man who 
after the defeat of Braddock, crossed the moun- 
tains from the thin line of Atlantic settlements 
and found his way into Kentucky and Tennessee, 
halting in his march only when he turned in his 
tracks and crossed the Ohio River into the great 
wilderness to the North. 

I mean the man who, fronting more perils 
than Ulysses and his followers ever thought of, 
swept on through the passes that led to the Ten- 
nessee, the Holston, the Big Kanawha, and the 
Ohio, reinforced by the few spirits, remote but 
courageous, who, in course of time, were led to 
the same destination up the narrow strip of 
water knowTi as the Mohawk. This man steadily 
solidified his settlements in their order of suc- 
cession, until he had brought into the Federal 
ITnion the States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, 
Indiana, Illlinois, Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, 
Wisconsin, and Minnesota. To me, this man 
reflects the character of the most effective single 
himian movement in history. 

Voluntarily and without a single act by gov- 
ernment to drive, or coax, or cajole him, with 
no persecution from which he must flee in order 



4 THE AMERICAN PIONEER 

to be and remain a man, with no neglect, no 
grievance against those left behind, with no 
thought of gold, and Avithout the remotest idea 
of war and conquest, this man set forth without 
compass, with no path more distinct than that 
made by his natural enemy, the Indian, obeying 
those laws of God and man in which he and his 
forebears had been trained, all the while follow- 
ing the dictates of his own desire for freedom, 
adventure, the extension of his language and 
religion, and the betterment of his race. 

II 

To me, not much of the philosophy of this 
man's life and achievements is revealed in 
the story of movements and stopping-places. 
Though always interesting and important, the 
mere mention of the thousands of new communi- 
ties — of the villages and toT\Tas actually made, 
of those dreamed of or even of the unnmnbered 
places born and named only to die as soon as 
the surveyor and the town-site proprietor had 
driven stakes into the boundless prairies — does 
not go very far. In number they resemble the 
sands of the seashore and each emphasizes the 
gregarious qualities in himian nature. 

The Pioneer's real story is much larger, more 
far-reaching, more pervasive, more creative, 



THE AMERICAN PIONEER 5 

fuller of the imaginative and the spiritual, alive 
with the thought that peered into the future and 
waited patiently for the new birth which should 
give it power. It included the creative and the 
positive; it foresaw the time when, with new 
and larger outlook, mankind in this fertile Val- 
ley might indeed produce in abundance, as of 
necessity, those kindly fruits of the earth which, 
enlarging the margin between populations and 
need, would draw into the world untold thou- 
sands and bring greater comfort and increased 
knowledge to the masses already here. 

The story I have wanted to hear includes the 
incidents of an increased area and a bettered 
culture of the soil ; a broadened field of peaceful, 
w^holesome conquest for the mind; a decline of 
superstition and intolerance; a growth in com- 
mon understanding; the gradual elimination of 
the quack from medicine, the parasite or the 
wilful idler from industry, the sloven from the 
household, the pettifogger from the judicial 
bench, and the bigot from the pulpit. I have 
hoped that it might herald the advent of the 
poet, the creative novelist, the critic, the musi- 
cian, and the artist, and insure their dominating 
influence upon the people who were destined to 
spring up in the vast territory entered by Boone 
in 1769, visited by Washington in 1770, and 



6 THE AMERICAN PIONEER 

sanctified by the wholesome labors and the 
thought of the unsung millions who trod within 
its limits until the general advent of new condi- 
tions at the close of the Civil War, which indi- 
cated that this Pioneer might be said fairly to 
have finished his most urgent task. 

Ill 

Looking back at the history of such a people 
— slowly gathering recruits from nearly every 
quarter of the compass, without any gift for 
telling their own story and with, no realization 
that they had one, with little conception of what 
they were doing or trying to do, and only an 
aggregation because as adventurous individuals 
they had common ideas — it is surprising that 
more of a literature should not have grown out 
of a movement of such magnitude. The earlier 
great Indian wars, however, which had kept 
before the outside w^orld the struggling colonies 
with their narrow limits, had given way to petty 
struggles for clearing the wilderness alike of 
human obstacles and of trees, and the later ma- 
neuvers of small bodies of armed men and the 
achievements of their leaders no longer had the 
dramatic interest which from the earliest days 
tended to limit the thing sometimes called 
historv. 



THE AMERICAN PIONEER 7 

No other event so important as this settlement 
has been more distinctly the triumph of peace. 
Section after section of forest was surveyed and 
conquered ; township after township was named 
and added to the map ; county after county was 
settled and organized until within the scant cen- 
tury from 1769 to 1865 many millions of people 
of a single race and religion and moved by a 
common purpose were living on the vast area 
defined by the Alleghenies and the Great Plains 
and between the Tennessee and the Great Lakes. 
They kept almost no records, they wrote few 
letters and fewer memoirs; but, to maintain an 
ideal, they w^ere able at the end of this time to 
set more than a million soldiers in the field — 
four times the number that England had sent 
out from her shores to save herself and to defeat 
what was called the Corsican ogre. 

But the story of this movement should be 
written: in the main, it awaits the telling. 
Looked at from the point of view of the great 
epics which somehow seem to lie ready-made at 
the foundations of human endeavor, the details 
of such a hegira seem dull and monotonous. 
The settlement of one township, or county, or 
State; the going up this stream or that; the 
building, in a crude way and under severe 
difficulties, of this or that road; the develop- 



8 THE AMERICAN PIONEER 

ment of am^liing that would facilitate the 
transportation of men or products — always the 
prime necessity in human movement — these do 
not lend themselves to exciting narrative. 

In all this half million square miles, the at- 
tractions of raw nature nowhere lent themselves 
to description. It was a monotonous succession 
of flatnesses where there were no lofty moun- 
tains, no great waterfalls, and no seas or inland 
gulfs to I'elate it to the outside world. It had 
no strange fauna, no marvellous flora, and no 
overwhelming natural wonders. It had neither 
silver, gold, nor precious stones, nor any of the 
artiflcial attractions that in the jDast had pro- 
duced the excitements that give romance to 
nature. 

lY 

What remains to be told is the story of men 
who, coming from the outside, had both to de- 
stroy and to create as they went, while mov- 
ing on to adjust themselves to themselves and 
their enviromiient. They had left a settled life 
filled with the material comforts of their time. 
There did not lie before them a single prospect 
that contributed to selfish indulgence, to luxury, 
or even to the enlargement of that liberty and 
toleration which, wherever they were, was fully 



THE AMERICAN PIONEER 9 

assured and fairlv the same. What remains for 
the historian, the poet, the romancer, is to take 
the dull story that these men began to make, 
surround it with human elements alone, invest 
with enduring interest their great region with 
its resulting myriads of people varied in origin, 
and finally as an entity, both real and imagina- 
tive, to dovetail them into the times and condi- 
tions into which the whole area has come. 

This greatest of valleys lies here, not more in- 
teresting in itself than for what has been done in 
it, within a short space of a hundred and fifty 
years, by live, real men. It is their work, their 
motives, their struggles, their joys and sorrows, 
and their conquest of a place in the world's 
regard that must be the theme of the story 
which we and our successors shall tell. We can 
not go on, as we might easily be tempted to do, 
playing the game of brag, glorifying a bigness 
in which we have no part, otherwise than as 
revealing what man can do. 

Now, what has been done by way of telling 
this story? How well have we recognized the 
real things that will bring back to the gener- 
ations that are passing, and those that are com- 
ing, the memories of what they and their fathers 
did ? What material have we furnished to their 
successors upon the same physical scene in order 



10 THE AMERICAN PIONEER 

that they may know what the foundations were, 
in order that all may have in them and their 
builders that pride without which we can not 
become and remain a united force? 

If our people can not learn how their heritage 
has been created they will not have either the 
interest or the intelligence to know and under- 
stand the larger things in the world about them. 
If they can not find out about the men who made 
their country they are likely to be indifferent to 
the State, the nation, and the world. If we can 
not be interested and absorbed in the men who 
laid the foundations and made possible the su- 
perstructure, we are little likely to care for the 
finished community, great or small. They may 
have their houses in Main Street ; but what will 
they know about that larger thing, the Main 
Country, and the Main World, that lie ever 
behind it? 

y 

Eliminating, then, as incidental or unimpor- 
tant the physical features common to thousands 
of communities, how is this human element to 
be so presented that it shall interest and in- 
struct ? It seems to me that the problem reduces 
itself to a few simple elements. At their foun- 
dation, as in all history, lies biography. How 



THE AMERICAN PIONEER 11 

persistently and intelligently have our people 
been taught that they are the product of indi- 
vidual as opposed to or contrasted with collective 
effort ? The processes of settlement grew out of 
what men did as men. Whether with creative, 
or ordinary, or only poor white minds, they came 
and went as individuals, not as they were led or 
drawn in colonies or in some other mobilized 
capacity, and they can not be understood from 
any treatment other than as what they actually 
were. This biographical treatment must be 
worked out by the historian. 

Neither here nor anywhere else does the auto- 
biography, or other voluntary ready-made ma- 
terial, play an important part. If the annals 
are to be sought of a county — in western settle- 
ment always the central geographical fact — 
somebod}^ must dig them up from the minds of 
the men and women who made or knew of this 
life for w^hat it was. Certain materials lie hid- 
den away in letters, but the people who have 
them do not see their value. This must be left 
to the trained mind, keen and ambitious to know 
about beginnings. 

My own experience early showed me that the 
most interesting facts, vital to reveal and inter- 
pret this life in one of these minor areas, could 
be found only by prospecting in the minds of 



12 THE AMERICAN PIONEER 

settlers. Until experience j^roves it, few stu- 
dents see how far back into the past hmnan 
memories go or how little we realize that they 
had in them the materials from which real his- 
tory must be written. I myself have known 
keen-minded, intelligent forebears who, born a 
hundred and fifty years ago, had a broad per- 
sonal knowledge which they never thought of as 
historical ; and they were the beneficiaries of like 
traditions still older. 

It will be recalled that M. Jourdain found out 
only late in life that he had always been talking 
prose ; while Harriet Martineau, after long deal- 
ing with industrial questions, did not know that 
she had been writing Political Economy until 
this fact was l)orne in upon her after she began 
the long series of researches that resulted in her 
illustrations of that science, in many resjoects — 
after the ''Wealth of Nations" — the most in- 
fluential production in its line known to our 
language. 

So it is with our Valley story. These custo- 
dians of it who carried its facts in their minds 
never thought of themselves as knowing any- 
tiring that had a relation to the history of the 
race; and yet it is just this process which, from 
Herodotus down, has created the writings that 
have made known Egypt, Greece, Rome, Eng- 



THE AMERICAN PIONEER 13 

land , and every other society in the world. 
Somebody came along, delved into these mem- 
ories, wherever found, wrote down what they 
had stored up, collated one with another, and 
made them into enduring material by burning 
them in clay or writing them on papyrus or on 
the skins of animals. 

Whatever literary materials we already have 
in our Great Valley, or shall hereafter gather, 
whatever we may know or think we know, either 
has come or will come in this way. We welcome 
the result and can only obtain perfection by this 
process. This is true, too, in spite of the fact 
that of late years much reliance has been placed 
upon the newspaper, most of whose records 
must be verified, by the means indicated, before 
they can be used with safety. 

VI 

Much has been done in every one of our cen- 
tral or grouped communities, know^n as States, 
to commemorate the men who have really domi- 
nated the series of events that make them what 
they are. Owing to the exaggerated attention 
given to the thing known as politics — though it 
now has almost less than nothing to do with the 
science of government — we have cluttered up 
our historical barnyards with great heaps of 



14 THE AMERICAN PIONEER 

chaff. Happily, the winds scatter them, year by 
year, and they are no more ; after which process 
we have to start anew and take stock of what 
is left. When we have done this, we find a large 
measure of neglect of the real builders, of the 
outstanding creative minds left to us. We see 
an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, 
Samuel F. Miller, whom even oversight can not 
hide although no adequate record has been made 
of his training, character, and achievements. 
We see another, Thomas M. Cooley, who with- 
out much stored knowledge of his career, still 
lives as a man of high judicial attainments, the 
creator of the modern method of railroad regu- 
lation — one who never let the power conferred 
upon him run away with common sense and cool 
judgment. We see Hugh McCulloch, growing 
out of an unpromising soil into a real genius of 
finance, whose name must be summoned, when 
to use the three fingers of one hand it becomes 
necessary to complete the enumeration of great 
Secretaries of the Treasury; and yet he still 
stands with little more biographic recognition 
than the scant record made in his own meagre 
memoirs. 

Practically every State in our Valley, from 
North to South, and from the encircling moun- 
tains to the great rivers, can furnish examples 



THE AMERICAN PIONEER 15 

of sucli neglect. Even outside our limits a figure 
of such titanic proportions as John Marshall, 
has only been fairly revealed by the patient 
labors, recently completed, of one of our Valley 
historians. 

When it comes to works of the imagination, 
the fact that we can not lay claim to the epic poet 
or the dramatist may indicate that not enough 
time has elapsed or that the forms of literary 
expression have changed. We shall not belittle 
ourselves and our achievements in prose fiction 
while Edward Eggleston's "Hoosier Schoolmas- 
ter," and Mark Twain's *'Tom Sawyer" and 
"Huckleberry Finn" remain as parts of our 
literary heritage, and the late James Whitcomb 
Riley — not yet wholly overshadowed by the lau- 
rels heaped upon him by the weak and the senti- 
mental who have little comprehension of him — 
still remains a high interpreter of the simple life 
that so distinguished the American Pioneer. 

VII 

We have still to travel a long and weary road ; 
but the start has been auspicious and creditable 
and we have many workers who bid fair not to 
tire on the journey that lies before them. The 
story of beginnings always unfolds itself slowly 
and with an amoimt of crudeness that is inevita- 



16 THE AMERICAN PIONEER 

ble. It is only within a hundred years that we 
have come fairly to know the origins, the influ- 
ence, the weakness, the strength, and the beauties 
of our religion. It was two hundred and thirty 
years after the Pilgrims came before there was 
found a writer to show that the story of Hester 
Prynne was more interesting and permanent 
than the records of the blustering bigotries of 
John Endicott; while a still longer time passed 
before the early economic history of Virginia 
was written once and for all. We waited a long 
time to get some fair idea of the Winning of the 
West ; but when it came, Theodore Roosevelt had 
done something more important than all the 
acts that made up his career as President of the 
United States. The former was the calculated 
product of mind, study, and training ; the latter 
had in it man}^ of the elements of the fortuitous. 
We have, therefore, a right to take heart; to 
go on with energy and method ; to learn that we 
must cultivate patience and practice persistence, 
and master not only the dry facts, so often ac- 
counted to us as a reproach, but study those 
beauties of expression without which we can not 
presmne to carry our appeal to the higher courts 
of literature. 



LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 



014 497 339 2 



